Natural History Museum, Urban Nature Project
Beyond Net Zero: Biodiversity positive design
Wake-up call
Human activities have a significant impact on the natural processes stabilising the Earth’s system, and the building industry has an especially outsized impact. We know that six out of nine planetary boundaries have now been transgressed, and that the mass of human-made objects has surpassed the mass of all living things.1 As one of the main contributors, the construction industry is responsible for 50% of material extraction and 62% of waste in the UK.2
The ecological impact of construction relates to the impact the extraction and manufacturing of materials has on the natural environment and biodiversity. Assessing the ecological impact of construction is an evolving field, with new methodologies and calculation tools continually emerging. The Embodied Ecological Impacts project, developed by the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), highlights that:
“Unlike carbon, which has the same impact globally, ecological impacts are often specific to local environments, interconnected with other ecosystems, and therefore impossible to address universally.” 3
How do we go beyond designing for net zero carbon and move towards regenerative architecture?
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Natural History Mueum Urban Nature Project
© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
The answer is biodiversity positive design
One answer is biodiversity positive design, as an approach reducing carbon emissions, while also helping to halt biodiversity loss and restore nature in the longer term.
The Nature Positive Initiative defines ‘Nature Positive’ as:
“Halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 on a 2020 baseline and achieve full recovery by 2050. To put this more simply, it means ensuring more nature in the world in 2030 than in 2020 and continued recovery after that.” 4
A biodiversity positive approach requires a major shift into assessing our ecological impact far beyond the project boundary. But how can our industry minimise its negative impact if we don’t fully understand or directly control how materials are extracted and manufactured? We promote retrofit, reuse, use resources efficiently and choose materials responsibly to minimise environmental harm.
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- We use circular design principles to keep materials in the loop at their highest value to reduce the need for new materials and thereby minimise degradation to areas where materials are extracted from.
- We carry out material audits to facilitate conversations and identify items that can be reused from the existing building. We also promote and champion the use of material reuse platforms.
- We collaborate with the supply chain to gather data, improve transparency and speed up the process of developing product-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to assess the environmental impacts of materials better, including the impacts beyond carbon.
- We promote the use of locally sourced natural materials to reduce material extraction elsewhere and to lock in biogenic carbon.
- We consider the local water system and the importance of designing for low water use, critical in places like Cambridge where water abstraction is damaging chalk streams, one of the world’s rarest and most vulnerable habitats
Let’s imagine the future together
Though we may feel our industry cannot help to restore biodiversity, we can make small steps towards judging the ecological impact of our projects and promote solutions that prioritise reuse rather than the extraction of materials. We believe that our approach to the built environment can be based on a culture of care, by maintaining buildings so they last a very long time and caring about the neighbourhood, where interspecies harmony can flourish. A web of projects, rather than projects designed in isolation, can promote more-than-human design for all species to thrive and for humans to reconnect with nature.
1 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Planetary Boundaries
2 Embodied Ecological Impacts | UKGBC
3 UKGBC, Embodied Ecological Impacts | UKGBC
4 What is the Nature Positive Initiative? | Nature Positive Initiative
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We launched our Beyond Net Zero whitepaper in April, a series of short insight articles and project case studies. This paper is an encapsulation of what we believe as a practice, a summary of what we see as the state of the net-zero nation, and a statement of our intent. You can download our whitepaper from our website: https://www.maxfordham.com/practice-people/journal/max-fordham-beyond-net-zero
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